new on DVD (Region 1 and Region 2): week of February 9

Chad is one of those grand force-of-nature characters, like Chigurh, who cannot help but be at the center of something extraordinary — it just so happens that where he goes when he takes the reins is into a magnificent load of nonsense, a glorious madness that leaves you pondering the human capacity for being an enormous lunkhead, rather than into a gloomy bloodbath that makes you question the worth of humanity. But, you know, same difference, really.

It all moves so swiftly and so surely that you never realize how ridiculous it is at the time. It’s only after that you go, Hmmm, and note how retro its ideas about feminine “purity” are — the movie revels in taunting us with the possibility of Daddy’s Little Girl being ravished unless he can save her in time.

The House Bunny appears to think it’s being “complicated” and “deep” when it has Shelley remind brainy Zeta Natalie that “boys don’t like girls who are too smart.”… But this unbelievably vapid excuse for a comedy does nothing to actually support such a contention — that Shelley is wrong about what boys like — and instead offers up these women as willing sacrificial lambs to the satan of conformity that demands they adhere to a brand of “acceptable” appearance and behavior that is so narrow that it’s all but impossible for any mere mortal to fall within it.

Surely this is the greatest satire of the American presidency ever made for film. It’s kinda like Being There, but far more terrifying: instead of a wise, gentle idiot becoming president, here it’s an incurious, perpetually adolescent idiot who ascends to the highest office in the land. Surely this would be a horror story if it were true — and at times it feels like it could only be true, in that truth-is-stranger-than-fiction way, it’s so preposterous — but safely ensconced in the realm of cinematic nonsense, we can breathe easy.

[A] frank and unrefined tale of women doing what it takes to survive, particularly when dominant, male-centered cultures have abandoned them…. Fascinating is how Hunt’s story straddles moralities, gender motivations, and ideas of poverty and despair in such a way that you’re not sure, by the end, what’s “right” and what isn’t.

If there’s a miracle to Miracle at St. Anna, it’s a rude one: it may well be that here we have a film obviously crafted with deep earnestness and profound love and serious talent… and it fails entirely, on every level, in every way that a movie can fail. It’s as if supernatural intervention were required so that no smidgen of that indefinable movie magic could be generated. We come to the end — after a long slog of 160 minutes — and we find ourselves saying, “Yes, and…?” and no answer is forthcoming. Could be this is the longest and most expensive shaggy-dog story ever told.